Pokémon GO is one of the most used free apps in the App Store, and even in the Google Play Store right now. The game provides an augmented reality experience of the real world, complimented with the presence of virtual Pokémon, and it’s an understatement to say that people are loving it.

Pokémon: Gotta’ Catch ‘Em All!

It’s not just the original phrase from the Pokémon theme song, it’s the truth! You want to catch them all. That’s what the game’s all about.

Collecting Pokémon

Let’s start with collecting them. When it comes right down to collecting Pokémon, it all comes down to chance. You really can’t control what Pokémon are going to pop up in front of you, but sometimes you get lucky and something interesting or rare pops up in front of your path and gives you the opportunity to catch it.

You can use PokéStop lures, or personal Incenses to lure Pokémon to your area to increase your odds of finding something you want. If you don’t, your chances become even more random that you’ll find something useful.

When you go get a Pokémon on your map that you’re interested in catching, you can just tap on it from your map and start throwing PokéBalls at it and hope for the best. For the most part, lower-level Pokémon are going to be easy to catch, and higher-level Pokémon are going to be harder to catch.

You can tell if a Pokémon will be easy or hard to catch by the color of the ring that appears when you tap on the PokéBall. If it’s a green ring, you can expect it to be easy. A yellow ring suggests it’ll be slightly harder. And an orange ring suggests it’ll be moderately harder, and so on.

You’re probably also going to get a lot of the same Pokémon. We suggest collecting every single one of them, because they’re all worth XP (experience), and this allows you to level up and unlock new items.

When you get more than one of the same Pokémon, you can transfer your doubles, triples, or whatever to the professor, and he will reward you with a candy for that Pokémon, which will be useful as you’ll soon learn later in this tutorial. To transfer a Pokémon, just open it up in your Pokémon inventory, and tap on the Transfer button:

We don’t recommend transferring Pokémon that you only have one of, because this means you will have to re-collect it to have it in your inventory.

Powering-up Pokémon

When you have a good inventory of Pokémon, you’ll notice that you collect stardust and Pokémon candy with each and every catch. These items are used for powering-up Pokémon, and you should use them wisely because you don’t get a whole lot of it.

To power-up a Pokémon, you’ll pick one from your Pokémon inventory and you’ll see a Power Up button immediately under your stardust and candy count for that specific Pokémon. In the case of this Vaporeon, which is an evolved form of Eevee, you can see we have 5 Eevee candies and we have 3437 stardust.

The requirements to power-up this Vaporeon are 1600 stardust and 2 Eevee candies, which means we can power it up at at most twice with our current supplies.

Powering-up your Pokémon, as you can see, raises the Pokémon’s CP (combat power) and HP (hit-points) level. The higher your hit-points are, the more damage your Pokémon will be able to sustain in a battle.

You should be sparing with your stardust and your candies, because candies are used for more than just powering-up, and we’ll get to that in a second. The stardust, on the other hand, are pretty easy to produce by simply catching more Pokémon, but still it takes a while to accumulate them.

Another thing to note about the candies is that they’re different for each Pokémon. This means that even if I use all my Eevee candies, I will still have a separate pile of candies for my other Pokémon, and I can power those up separately with their own candy supply. You can’t use one Pokémon’s candy on a different Pokémon; it has to be the same name Pokémon, or an evolved form of it.

I suggest only powering up your strongest Pokémon that are fully evolved so that they’re combat ready whenever you plan on getting into battles at gyms, or with other players in the future when the feature is finally added.

Evolving Pokémon

Now as we noted, there are also other uses for candies; they are used to evolve Pokémon as well. For this reason, we don’t suggest wasting them on powering up your Pokémon until you’ve first evolved them, as this unlocks new Pokémon in your PokéDex.

For example, we have the requirement of 50 Goldeen candies to evolve this Goldeen into a Seaking. To start the evolution process, we’ll open the Goldeen from our Pokémon inventory, tap on the Evolve button, then confirm the evolution, and you’ll get to see a firework display before your eyes as the Pokémon evolves on your screen:

Because we spent 50 of our 82 Goldeen candies on this evolution process, we have 32 left that we can use to power-up our Seaking. It’s a good investment, because Seaking is the highest evolution available for Goldeen, so we won’t need to evolve one of these again.

If you’re in need of more candies, you can get more by catching more of the same Pokémon (or its base stage), or by transferring your duplicates of this Pokémon (or its base stage) to the Professor. So keep this in mind.

Wrapping up

Now that you know a little bit more about collecting, powering-up, and evolving your Pokémon, you’re ready to start your journey as a Pokémon trainer with the free Pokémon GO app from the App Store.